In channel bonding systems, such as transponder bonded systems, transport stream packets of audio streams and/or video streams corresponding to multiple different programs are multiplexed and/or interleaved together to form a single transport stream that may be referred to as a fat transport stream. The programs corresponding to the individual transport stream packets may be determinable from program identifiers (PIDs) carried in headers of the transport stream packets. The transport stream packets of the fat transport stream are then segmented into chunks, e.g. that include one or more transport stream packets, and marker information is added to indicate the chunk boundaries and provide information about the chunks. The chunks are distributed into chunk data streams for transmission over multiple bonded physical channels, such as coaxial channels, Ethernet channels, wireless channels, etc.
A receiving device receives the chunk data streams over the multiple bonded physical channels and may buffer the received chunk data streams, e.g. in DRAM. For example, the receiving device may buffer the received chunk data streams to compensate for latency differences between the different physical channels. A collator of the receiving device may reconstruct the fat transport stream by aligning the chunks based at least on the marker information. A filter of the receiving device, e.g. a PID filter, may then filter the reconstructed fat transport stream, based at least on the PIDs of the transport stream packets, to retrieve the audio and/or video streams corresponding to one of the programs, e.g. a program being presented to a user.
Although the receiving device may only utilize the transport stream packets corresponding to one of the programs carried by the fat transport stream, the receiving device may allocate memory and processing resources towards reconstructing the entire fat transport stream, e.g. including the transport stream packets that are not utilized by the receiving device. For example, if the difference between the latencies associated with the different physical channels is high, a large amount of buffer space may be required to buffer the entire chunk data streams. Furthermore, the collator may need to process the transport stream packets of the chunk data streams at the aggregate rate of the multiple bonded channels.